One year ago, Paul O’Kane wrote to me, saying he’s an artist, writer, publisher and lecturer in fine arts based in London, and that he has used my essay for many years to inspire his students to start thinking about art, society and technology. Recently, he and two colleagues had started a not-for-profit artist’s publishing company, eeodo, and wanted to print a special edition of my essay. Would I give my permission to do so? Of course, I did.

One month ago, the book arrived, beautifully designed and illustrated by manga artist Kengyuan Qiu, with a preface by Paul O’Kane and a brief introduction by me. It can now be ordered from eeodo for £7.95.

Paul and I will be speaking briefly, after which Griseldis Kirsch, an expert in modern Japanese culture at SOAS, University of London, will chat with me about the state of otaku and otakulogy. The discussions will be followed by drinks and a book-signing. N.B. Booking required.

For this additional event, in Waterstones‘ basement bar, video work by artists Katya Gargi and Shinji Toya will join an ambient otaku soundscape supplied by musician Christopher Smith. The schedule starts with a screening of a 30-minute film by Bong Joon-Ho alluding to the Hikikomori lifestyle, after which artist, writer, lecturer and eeodo founder member Paul O’Kane will discuss the book and field questions with Hayato Fujioka, a specialist in modern Japanese Art History at CSM.

7. Juni 2015

The anthology Postcolonial Piracy. Media distribution and cultural production in the global south, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz from Potsdam University, is out. It was published by Bloomsbury in late 2014 whom Lars and Anja convinced to do so under a CC licence. The book says BY-NC-SA while the university website says BY-NC-ND and the Bloomsbury website doesn’t say anything at all. Bloomsbury presents the book in „PDF page image format“ as „Bloomsbury Open Access“, telling the reader: „The pages are provided here to facilitate browsing. If intending to read in full, you may prefer to download the original PDF,“ but not providing an opportunity to download. Anyway, it is available for download as postprint at the University Potsdam.

In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learnt about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context.

6. März 2011

Today, the Social Science Research Council released a large-scale study of music, film and software „piracy“ in the emerging economies of Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is must-read for everybody interested in global media markets and the shaping of the international copyright framework.

Directed by Joe Karaganis, Program Director of the Social Science Research Council, some thirty-five researchers worked together over three years to produce this unique study. The country reports on South Africa, Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico and Bolivia provide a fascinating panorama of the diversity of cultures. They also follow some common themes: that of access to cultural goods, of the desire to be included in global culture and the differential effects illicit trade has on local culture, on the socioeconomics of advertising, pricing and consumption, the varied sources of unauthorized copies mostly in the form of optical discs but with the rapid proliferation of broadband Internet access increasingly through file-sharing, on the moral economies of justifying unauthorized copies and, most importantly for public policy makers, on copyright law on the books and the reality of private and government enforcement efforts in these countries and in the global arena.

We are aware that we are proposing serious interventions in the market. Sometimes, the very thought of it makes us nervous. We want to divide the money flows in major segments of our national and global economies – which is what the cultural sectors are, after all – into far smaller portions of ownership. That will involve a capital restructuring of a formidable and almost unprecedented scope. The consequence of our proposals is that cultural and medial industries, in which turnovers run into the billions, will be turned upside down. We have hardly any predecessors who aimed so consistently at constructing totally new market conditions for the cultural field, or at least at laying the theoretical foundation for that construction. It is a comfort to us that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also unaware of what he was starting when he effected the New Deal, without wanting to compare ourselves with him in any way whatsoever. And yet he did it, it proved possible to fundamentally reform economic conditions.